Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
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28 Barber 1955
29 1840 resolution of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences supporting civil and religious marriage among the poor, cited in Donzelot 1979: 32
30 Ariès 1962
31 Poovey 1988: 10
32 Donzelot 1979: 36
33 Perrot 1990
34 Armstrong 1987
35 Elias [1939] 1994
36 Donzelot 1979: 46
37 Engels [1845] 1958: 145
38 Simpson 2006
39 Weeks 1981: 32
40 Foucault (1979a) described this as pastoral power, a version of earlier Christian ideas about ministry now in a secular form.
41 Donzelot 1979: 55
42 Henderson 1999: 44
43 ‘All common Prostitutes or Night Walkers wandering in the public Streets of public Highways, not giving a satisfactory account of themselves, shall be deemed idle and disorderly Persons;and it shall and may be lawful for any Justice of the Peace to commit such Offenders (being thereof convicted before him, by his own View, or his, her or their own Confession, or by the Oath of One or more credible Witness or Witnesses,) to the House of Correction, there to be kept to hard Labour for any Time not exceeding one Calendar Month.’ 3 Geo.IV, c.40, 1822. This ‘temporary’ Act was superseded by the all-encompassing Vagrancy Act of 1824; see Self 2003.
44 Mayhew 1851: 215
45 Nead 1988: 94
46 Josephine Butler Collection,Women’s Library, cited in Walkowitz 1980
47 Weeks 1981: l2
48 Scott 1987: 129
49 Rose and Miller 1992: 183
50 Roberts 1992; Bullough 1987
51 Foucault’s upwards continuity
52 Benabou 1987
53 The word fille was so closely associated with selling sex (filles soumises for women registered with the regulatory system, filles en carte for women registered and working independently, outside the houses) that ‘respectable’ girls had to be called specifically jeunes filles.
54 Nead 1988: 139
55 ‘As the century progresses, the growing fear of contamination is given medical justification by theories of degenerate heredity and syphilitic infection. In the imagination of a Huysmans, the entire organic world is diseased and decomposing, and the syphilitic prostitute is the morbid emblem of this collapse. Confronted by this pathological erosion, the writer must construct art against nature, against woman, against the organic. Such constructions of artifice and reflexivity signal the birth of modernism, which, I suggest, is inscribed on the prostitute’s wounded body.’ (Bernheimer 1989: 2).
56 Chevalier 1973: 267: n17
57 Corbin 1990: 9
58 Harsin 1985: 96-130
59 Harsin 1985: xvii
60 Coffin 1982: 92
61 A police officer, quoted in Pearson 1972: 23
62 ‘A woman who has fallen like a star from heaven, may flash like a meteor in a lower sphere, but only with a transitory splendour. In time her orbit contracts, and the improvidence that has been her leading characteristic through life now trebles and quadruples the misery she experiences. To drown reflection she rushes to the gin palace, and there completes the work that she had already commenced so inauspiciously. The passion for dress, that distinguished her in common with her sex in former days, subsides into a craving for meretricious tawdry, and the bloom of health is superseded by ruinous and poisonous French compounds and destructive cosmetics...’ (Mayhew 1851: 214). See also Tait 1840; Logan 1843; Greg 1850 and Sanger 1858.
63 Against this debunking, Frances Finnegan (1979) analysed archives in York and claims that the myth was true, and Acton the one making a myth.
64 During the Crimean War,William Howard Russell’s dispatches ‘enlightened the public to the fact that the British army’s most implacable opponent was disease’ (Bristow 1977: 79). The regimes imposed by and associated with the Acts are described in Walkowitz (1980) and Mahood (1990) and the movements to abolish the Acts in Bristow (1977), McHugh (1980) and Walkowitz (1980).
65 Leach 1980; Ferguson 1992;Walkowitz 1994
66 Armstrong 1987:133
67 Humphreys 1997
68 Perrot 1990: 255; see also Levine 1990: 46
69 William R. Greg called redundant those women who were not fortunate enough to marry, ‘who in place of completing, sweetening and embellishing the existence of others are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete existence of their own’ (1876: 276). Paintings of the time showed ‘the reduced gentleman’s daughter’, ‘the poor teacher’, the ‘fortune hunter’, ‘the seamstress’, ‘the fallen woman’ (Roberts 1972). The surplus of middle-class women is usually ascribed to the emigration of men, the differences in mortality rates of men and women, and the tendency of middle-class men to marry later than women.
70 Levine 1990: 158
71 Davidoff 1979; Donzelot 1979
72 It may be that any paid occupation for women was tainted, as nursing was (Holcombe 1977: 69).
73 Davidoff and Hall 1987: 183–9
74 Mary Wollstonecraft was known to comment that respectable women were the most oppressed members of society.
75 This tradition was so long that Daniel Defoe complained of the ‘amphibious’ lifestyle of women who moved to and fro from domestic service to bawdyhouses (Defoe 1725: 7).
76 Davis 1975
77 Landes 1988: 75. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed there was no correct life for women outside retirement and domesticity, acting was the most odious of all ‘public’ existences they could have.
78 Béraud 1839: 51
79 Kracauer 1937
80 Weeks 1981: 58
81 Corbin 1990: 205
82 Wilson 1995: 61
83 Wilson 1995: 72–89
84 Kanner 1972: 191
85 Novel of personal development or education
86 A short list illustrating the two tendencies includes Jane Eyre, Ruth, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Nana and Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
87 Schreiner [1885] 1988
88 Peiss 1983: 78
89 Nead 1988: 180
90 Scott 1987: 122
91 For some suggestive treatments of race issues, see Davidoff 1979 and McClintock 1995.
92 In the British system, the hospital director was male, but the day-to-day overseer of operations was a matron. The French system used women as dames de maison, or brothel managers, and as submistresses carrying out the actual business.
93 Fabian 1983: 18
94 Poovey 1995: 34
95 Some tried to prove through anthropometry that women who sold sex were biologically degenerate, born with a constitution and disposition to this particular evil; see Lombroso and Ferrero 1895.
96 Glotz and Maire, quoted in Barber 1955: 14-15
97 Vicinus 1977: x
98 Armstrong 1987
99 Scott 1987: 123
100 Poovey 1988: 10
101 ‘The same logic that allowed women to carry the skills they possessed as women into the new world of work would eventually provide the liberal rationale for extending the doctrine of self-regulation and, with it, the subtle techniques of domestic surveillance beyond the middle-class home and into the lives of those much lower down on the economic ladder. It was not uncommon for nineteenth-century conduct books to put forth a rather explicit theory of social control’ (Armstrong: 1987, 133)
102 Weeks 1981: 32-3
103 Walkowitz 1994
104 Bland 1992: 400
105 Louise Twining, quoted in Nead 1988: 199
106 Ryan 1990: 122
107 Charles 1860: 4
108 Higgs [1905] 1976: 281
109 Mort 1987: 43
110 Mumm 1996: 2
111 Bland 1992: 403
112 Corbin 1987: 213
113 Stoler 1995
114 Stoler and Cooper 1997: 5
115 Cooper 1997: 409
116 Chisholm 1847, quoted in Summers 1975: 300
117 Henriot 2001
118 Howell 2000
; 119 Ware 1992: 156
120 Guy 1992
121 Poovey 1995: 46-7
122 Walkowitz 1994: 54-5
123 Mahood 1990: 78 and 84
124 Mumm 1996: 9-10
125 Bartley 2000: 33
126 Kanner 1972: 186
127 Bartley 2000: 61
128 Prochaska 1980
129 Humphreys 1997
130 Mahood 1990: 116
131 Corbin 1990: 280
132 Mumm 1996: 2
133 Quoted in Leach 1980: 295
134 Bristow 1977: 70
135 Foucault 1991: 79
136 The panopticon was a design for prisons proposed by Jeremy Bentham in 1791, a circular building with cells around the outside and a central surveillance point, from which an observer could see all prisoners.
137 Summers 1975: 280-82
138 In 1860 there were about 65 such homes in Britain, accommodating about 1,300 women (Bristow 1977: 70).
139 Corbin 1990: 15
140 Reproduced in Finnegan 1979: 173
141 Foucault 1978:128
142 From ‘Seeking and Saving’, quoted in Bartley 2000: 62
143 Summers 1979: 33. Mary Wollstonecraft led a life of personal sexual freedom, influenced men of the French Revolution on the subject of women’s rights, published what some call the first feminist treatise (1792) and yet exhorted women in general to stay home and be pure.
144 Poovey 1988: 4-5
145 Holcombe 1977: 10
146 Holcombe 1977: 20
147 Stansell 1982: 311
148 ‘Swindling Sal’, quoted in Bracebridge Hemyng, ‘Prostitution in London’, in London Labour and the London Poor,Mayhew [1851] 1968: 23. Also quoted in Walkowitz 1980.
149 Walkowitz 1977: 76
150 McClintock 1995: 114
151 Bartley 2000: 58
152 Mort 1987: 113; see also Bartley 2000. However:‘On its own terms ... [rescue work] was far from failing. As the Church Penitentiary Association pointed out in 1862, “the Mission of the Association is to rescue individual souls; and if, out of the number who annually leave the Penitentiaries, between two hundred and three hundred are permanently rescued, who can dare to say that little is done?”’ (Bristow 1977: 70)
153 Corbin 1990: 35
154 Dean 2002: 120
155 Henderson 1999: 91
5
GRASPING THE THING ITSELF: METHODOLOGY
The curious double position of the European, as participant-observer, makes it possible to experience the Orient as though one were the visitor to an exhibition. Unaware that the Orient has not been arranged as an exhibition, the visitor nevertheless attempts to carry out the characteristic cognitive maneuver of the modern subject, separating himself from an object-world and observing it from a position that is invisible and set apart. From there, like the modern anthropologist or social scientist, one transfers into the object the principles of one’s relation to it and, as Pierre Bourdieu says, conceives of it as a totality intended for cognition alone. The world is grasped, inevitably, in terms of a distinction between the object – the thing itself as the European says – and its meaning, with no sense of the historical peculiarity of this effect we call the thing itself.1
Timothy Mitchell’s idea is useful to an understanding of what the social researcher does when conceiving and arranging objects of research. In my case, I am the participant-observer in an exhibition of social agents, both implicated in the exhibition and struggling to see it from a critical vantage point while remaining visible to the people researched. Nor do these represent any totality. But I do think it is useful to turn this European kind of gaze onto Europeans themselves: a temporary exhibition, as it were, of traits assumed to be normal. In this chapter I relate how I did my field work.
How I Came to This Subject
My study of the issues raised in this book began in my own social-type work in the mid-1990s: in a paralegal project on the Mexican border with Central Americans and Cubans seeking asylum in the US; in a Caribbean NGO doing HIV/AIDS prevention among people selling sex and often travelling to Europe; and with projects in Chile,Argentina and Brazil to understand tourism and migration. Everyone I met spoke the same way about travel and work, including selling sex: pragmatic, resigned, perhaps sad but also unwilling to consider migrants victimised; on the contrary, many in NGOs and doing community organising were thinking about migrating themselves and had family members abroad. When I came to Europe, however, I found that the services, programmes and projects reaching out to migrants discussed them in a very different way, especially if commercial sex was involved; migrants were seen as victims. The gap between these two ways of talking – why it exists, how it works, what keeps it going – motivated me to turn my questioning gaze away from the objects usually studied (poor women, ‘prostitutes’, migrants) to those engaged in ‘helping’ them.
I also wondered, after reading a great deal and participating in activist networks for some time, why so much passion and effort had not managed to improve life for people who sell sex. The social sector dedicated to helping them has grown and diversified, and some of the rhetoric has changed slightly, but the situation for the subjects themselves is largely unchanged: abolitionism continues to be the central moralising idea in hegemonic arguments, debate centres on how to ‘control prostitution’, unpredictable local toleration predominates, police abuse is endemic, commercial sex is blamed for spreading sexually transmitted diseases, thriving networks facilitate workers’ mobility and entrance into commercial sex, which pays far better than any other job available to women, male and transgender workers are overlooked, and research focuses repeatedly on individual motivations for buying and selling sex. There is an energetic campaign to counter these traditions worldwide, but progress is impeded by angry reactions from those favouring eradication of commercial sex. Sex workers, in studies that record their opinions, indict a broad range of authorities including police, judges, doctors, lawmakers and researchers for their reinforcement of the ‘whore stigma’ and their direct or indirect collusion in the persecution of sex workers.
Discussing homosexuality,Weeks describes the historical problem as how to
explain the various sources of the social stigmatisation of homosexuals and the individual and collective response to this broadly hostile regulation. But the way to do this is not to seek out a single causative factor. The crucial question must be what are the conditions for the emergence of this particular form of regulation of sexual behaviour in this particular society?2
In the previous chapter, I reveal some of the conditions making possible the conceptualising of a class of victims that mandated a class of rescuers, as well as how helping practices exacerbated the stigmatising of victims. Since stigma is now continually blamed for the problems of sex workers, understanding how it is reproduced is useful, beyond the usual accusations at the media and police (though these are deserved). I limited the field by focusing on Spain, where the area of helping migrants, and ‘migrant prostitutes’ as a subcategory, was more recently identified than in some European countries. The smaller, emergent field in Spain made it easier to see the formation of the discourse, the steps taken to create projects, and the people who took them on. From my observations over a long time in other European countries as well, I can say that what I observed in Spain is not unique.
Why Do Field Work?
I did field work in order to gather information until now absent from most discussions of commercial sex, on the practices of social agents attempting to help people who sell sex. I had to go beyond helpers’ own descriptions of their projects, which involved participation over time within the social sector, examining the texture and atmosphere, as well as the words and gestures, making up their practice.
I chose anthropological theory and methodology for the field work, because I questioned the validity of frameworks that begin with moralising views at the outset by labelling the buying and selling of sex as deviance, victimisation or violence. Sin
ce these attitudes reproduce what drove me to undertake research, I wanted a theoretical space that would allow me to resist moralising as well as western cultures’ claim that its values are best. Cultural relativism avoids judging the object of study and provides insight into practices that may be incomprehensible unless researchers shed their assumptions.3 Relativism holds that a missionary may arrive in Samoa and begin teaching the concept of shame to naked natives by obliging them to cover their bodies, but an anthropologist should arrive there to observe and record existing customs, trying to abstain from imposing her own values. For me, anthropological settings provided a space where I could not only think but talk aloud about taboos, contradictions and stigmatised subjects related to sex, without having to announce my personal stance or condemn anyone else’s. It allowed me to study migrants and helpers, their words and actions, in the same kinds of ways, evaluating these within their own groups’ logic.
Studying ‘Up’
In 1969, Dell Hymes said that if anthropology didn’t exist, it would not need to be invented. But possibly the academic work anthropology has produced would not have existed had its authors been sociologists, historians or psychologists. Ethnography, the method which came to define anthropology, provides results that, if not more truthful than others, offer insights of its own. The term is used both for the research process and for its written product, the opening chapter of Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) usually cited as beginning the tradition. Ethnography is not simply not quantitative and does not pretend to provide a complete picture. Traditionally, it was used to study ‘down’, at cultures the west considered primitive.
By the 1960s, these assumptions were being questioned; Hymes’s collection, Reinventing Anthropology, was published in the aftermath of 1968. In widespread discussions on the relevance of academia, some anthropologists faced the cruel facts of their tradition: that it had often been racist, colonialist, west-centred, self-serving, frivolous and the running dog of imperialism and espionage (in the past for the British, in the present for the US). Much of this is documented in Hymes’s collection: William Willis suggests taking these skeletons from the closet, turning to urban ethnography and using ‘frog perspectives’ (Richard Wright’s term for the effort he wanted white people to make, looking up from where coloured people live);4 Eric Wolf prescribes ‘educating ourelves in the realities of power’;5 and Laura Nader articulates the principle of studying up: